Watching the English

How could I be suggesting that the Brits are outspoken when the anglo-EU translation guide so clearly suggested differently? And when a new paper I had just come across argued that the very construction of the English language encourages the “hinting” habit which the guide exemplifies?

On a scale with “hinting” at one end and “direct” at the other, we can place different national conversational styles.

Hinting people often prefer not to say exactly what they mean because they’re concerned with the effect their ideas might have on those they’re talking to. Instead of coming straight to the point (“I don’t think this will work” or “I want to conclude the meeting at 4 o’clock sharp”) hinting people prefer to hint at what they’re trying to say, hoping that the other person will understand without them having to be explicit.

The British art of “Politeness” is a classic form of indirectness. We have conventions of politeness that try to make the other person comfortable by not imposing, by giving them a way out, by being friendly etc. Other cultures have more direct styles and value the directness of saying what you mean, (even quite brutally), assuming the other person will appreciate their “honest” approach.

Since the British are at the “hinting” end of the scale we can find other more direct conversational styles aggressive, rude, or even obtuse. People from more direct cultures may find the British wishy-washy, inconsistent or even misleading. Hinters can come across as unclear and indecisive, whereas Direct people can come across as pushy, rude or insensitive.

An yet everyone recognizes the adversarial nature of the English political culture – nowhere more evident than in the confrontational layout of the House of Commons debating chamber, compared with the semi-circle of the French and German chambers. And continental regimes have a long tradition of coalitions and consensual government which is almost entirely absent from the British. In that respect, however, France is closer to Britain and the French legal system is, of course, notoriously confrontational.

The same article does, however, offer an explanation for the apparent contradiction between politeness and stubbornness

No matter how “traditional” the British may appear, they are in fact fierce individualists which might surprise foreigners ….Whereas the Brits have very formal and traditional rules of conduct and etiquette that apply to the first “impersonal” stages of a relationship or more particularly to the opening stages of a negotiation, once a more informal atmosphere has been established, there are no strict rules of conduct. As a French Business Manager put it, “in France we are less formal than the Brits at the start of a relationship, but over time, we don’t tend to become as informal as the British will”.

Individualism, however. may become downright stubbornness. Because we do not feel pressured to conform to a general consensus, a Brit will have no trouble saying “No” to any point which other European negotiators argue is for the “common good”. Insularity and the Island Mentality contribute to our willingness to fight point by point to the last. Our European partners may see this as a tough approach in multi party, multi cultural negotiations. Equally we can be seen to be playing the role of the devil’s advocate. Of course, the disadvantage of this “semi-detached” attitude is that we are often underachieve in longer-term joint venture projects. A perfect example of this is the high-speed rail link between the channel tunnel and London.

I recently came across a paper called Cultures of negotiation which suggested three explanatory factors for the embarrassing mess the UK has made of the Brexit negotiations
-       the adversarial political culture which I’ve just referred to
-       the Conservative “ideology of statecraft” which views the international system as a dangerous environment, is sceptical of notions of trust and cooperation, regards power as the fundamental currency of international politics, and accordingly regards the threat of force (or the application of other forms of power) as the best way to influence other actors
-       “weak socialisation into European structures” – a reference presumably to the reluctance particularly of English MPs and UKIP MEPs to get involved in European processes…

The first Part of Richard Lewis’s When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures  has a great diagram (figure 2.2 page 20) showing how this “withdrawal” syndrome works at a psychological level...
And the triangular diagram which graces this post is also taken from the early part of the book.....

I've taken the title of my post from Kate Fox's book of that name which you can access here. It’s actually a great read – although this review (called the awkward squad) doesn’t agree – finding it too flippant. This review – from a fellow anthropologist – gives it the respect I think it deserves

The polite but awkward squad?

All countries are obviously different – but this has not stopped academics from amusing themselves with long,  intense and generally incestuous debates about a particular country’s “exceptionalism”. At one time, it was about the United States (“why has socialism never taken hold?” “Why does religion have such a hold?” – if not “how has the country become so dominant?”); at another, Germany (whose historians had a great debate in the 1980s about the “Sonderweg “ (“how did such a cultured nation land up with the Nazis?”)

Britain (no longer “great”) has long been credited with being the first to experience the Industrial Revolution and, if not to invent “democracy”, at least to bring forward the modern version of “liberal democracy”. In that sense Britain inarguably has a distinctive - if not quite “exceptional” - history.

In European Union circles, it certainly has the reputation of being an “awkward” partner which always had a “semi-detached” attitude to the continent. Although the powerful concessions it won from its partners suggested it should be the last country to leave, most people were not surprised when it embraced Brexit…

But the question I want to explore is the relatively neglected one of what exactly accounts for this “awkwardness” of behaviour – after all, the Brits are equally well known for their politeness. One argument indeed is that it is this very politeness which explains the Perfidious Albion reputation “England” at least (as the Imperial overlord) has.

But first, a personal note. In the mid-1970s I was, by virtue of my position in one of Europe’s largest Regions, exposed for the first time to the dynamics and discourse of international gatherings. And I found myself quickly being among the first to try to puncture the rhetoric of particularly my southern European colleagues. I’ll never forget the subsequent semi-ostracization I suffered at a mountain retreat in Sicily as a result of my brutal assault on what I saw as the empty discourse of the participants.

In the 1980s, by then more experienced, I was lucky enough to be a member of the British delegation in the Council of Europe – the local government section – and learned to cultivate alliances with my Dutch, French, Belgian and German colleagues……But I realised that the impatient readiness to speak one's mind was a well-known British feature – matched only by that of the Dutch.

Since de Hofstede we are all, of course, familiar with the literature on the culture of geography - whose principal exponents are de Hofstede, Trompenaars and Inglehart. Richard Lewis’s When Cultures Clash (1996) is my favourite go-to reference whenever the discussion turns to questions of cultural difference – as is Richard Nisbett’s Geography of Thought (2003) who argues that -

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are therefore often mistaken. 

East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership. Causal attributions emphasize the context. Social factors are likely to be important in directing attention. East Asians live in complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is important to effective functioning.

But it’s more recently that many of us came across this devastating Anglo-EU translation guide which takes some common phrases Brits use; how our European partners generally understand them; and what the Brits really mean by them. 
For example - when we say "very interesting", foreigners think we are impressed. What we are actually thinking is that it's a lot of nonsense!

Similarly, when we say "with the greatest respect", we are actually thinking "the man's an idiot" whereas the non-English speaker assumes that he is being listened to.

"Incidentally, by the way" actually means "this is the primary purpose of the discussion" – but is thought by the unfortunate foreigner to mean that the issue is of no significance.

For those who deal with Brits, the table is essential preparation and, who knows, sharing it with them might open up new friendships.

All this is familiar ground……..good for conversation at parties and even in many business schools. But few people bother to go beyond this and try to explore why it is that the Brits behave this way….
It is to that question I will turn in the next post….

Further reading

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/03/britains-naive-exceptionalism/

https://www.cer.eu/insights/british-and-their-exceptionalism

http://www.unice.fr/crookall-cours/iup_cult/_docs/_RUGM_Chapter-05.pdf

At home in one’s Past (Demos report)

Discourse Analysis of a Michael Gove speech

The British Self and Continental Other

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-uk-never-felt-at-home-in-eu/

French, german and British perceptions of the Turkish bid for EU membership

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/how-i-learnt-to-loathe-england

A Musing Decade

The blog will be ten years old in the autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source - and the blog has therefore, for the past 5 years or so, been called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.

Observant readers will have noticed that this has been replaced by a new title – “The Bookish Explorer”. 
This is an experiment – and I hope you will not be too confused by the variety of titles you will find popping up in the next few weeks..

Why am I doing this? Simply because I want to raise the blog’s profile…

Although I was delighted when the monthly click rate rose a couple of years ago to 10,000, it has reached those dizzy heights on only 3 occasions and is currently running at half that level. I consider the blog an amazing “resource” (I will come back to that word) – on issues ranging from Brexit, administrative reform, Bulgarian and Romanian culture, Germany, the 2014 Scottish Referendum, the state (see the E-books in the top right column of the blog). But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on these subjects.....And the name indeed gives a false impression.... So I reckon the blog needs a name which better expresses its content and objectives
I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…

Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”..Not of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I have the capacity to recognize and want to pass on……

But what exactly, I hear you ask, do I mean when I say the blog is one of the longest-running “of its “kind”? Simply that the majority of blogs specialize in a particular topic - whether EC Law, literary reviews (a popular subject), economics (ditto) or Marxist economics – more popular than you think eg Michael Robert’s or Boffy’s Blog (going since 2007) which interrupts its Marxist exegesis with comment on British politics) 
Mine darts like a butterfly to a variety of flowers as I tried to explain in a post last year in the blog’s 2018 Annual – The Search for the Holy Grail. I indeed tried to argue that my claim for the reader’s attention is based on – 

- experience in an unusual variety of sectors (and countries) – each of which is closely manned with “gatekeepers”

- the compulsion (over a 50 year-period) to record the lessons of each experience in short papers

- Long and extensive reading

- A “voice” which has been honed by the necessity of speaking clearly to audiences of different nationalities and class

- intensive trawling of the internet for wide range of writing

- notes kept of the most important of those readings

- shared in hyperlinks with readers

So bear with me as I play around with the blog name – and indeed with its content..

Narratives of Encroachment

Like most people, these days, my attention tends to wander…my eye will soon catch something else. It’s not often that an article is able to hold my attention but “Turning Inward; Brexit, Encroachment Narrative and the English as a “secret people” achieved that amazing feat…

I almost missed it since it had been lurking as one of hundreds of hyperlinks which I store in a file but rarely activate.

And my attention was held because the author – one Prof Patrick Wright - had cunningly embedded in the article a video of his presentation which made even more interesting points than the article itself. But the sound-level was so low that I had to strain my ears to identify the embellishments he was making to the text.

Truly the sort of cunning technique one would expect from a Professor of “Literature and Visual and Material Culture”!! He is also the author of On living in an old country – national past in contemporary Britain, published in 1985.

The basic argument of his paper is that English society has been portrayed over the ages by certain writers with particular themes and symbols eg rustic meadows, the sound of a cricket ball and warm beer. The gallery of writers includes William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, JB Priestley and George Orwell….each of whom, admittedly in very varying degrees, paints pictures of “sturdy yeomen” under threat…

 While the Brexit campaigns have rightly been condemned for its appeals to xenophobia, and for the lies, misrepresentations and sheer opportunism of its leaders, there is more to be said than that. To the considerable extent that this resurgence of English identity has been engineered by partisan politicians, campaigners and journalists, it has also been activated by the deployment of allegorical narratives that work by simplification and polarisation.

In these encroachment narratives, the traditional nation and its way of life is typically squared off against a vividly imagined and probably advancing threat — be it immigrants, bureaucrats, Europe, ‘experts’ etc. Where the reality addressed is likely to be complex and full of nuance, encroachment narratives of this kind press that reality into a brutally simplified and prejudged opposition between good and evil. They often defend a traditional idea of community against modern forms of society and political organisation. They tend to favour common sense and instinct over long words, abstract knowledge and expertise. They make a virtue, particularly in the English context, of insularity and shrinkage. They champion the small, the grounded and the localised, as opposed to the large and mobile sweep of internationalisation and cosmopolitanism. They are highly resistant to any possibility of compromise or synthesis between their opposed terms.

 ……….Encroachment narratives abound in the writings of William Cobbett (1763–1835), the campaigning journalist and furious defender of the beleaguered Georgian countryside, whom Raymond Williams would place among the founders of a characteristically English idea of culture, and whose name now appears as a proto-Brexiteer in blog posts. He conducted his ‘rural rides’ as the agrarian revolution proceeded in the 1820s, producing a fulminating account of England as he saw it at this moment of transition…..
As G.D.H. Cole would assert much later, Cobbett lived before it became apparent that the urbanisation and industrialisation, which Cobbett saw as entirely hellish, would eventually open new possibilities of working class politics. As it was, Cobbett raged against everything he could blame for the destruction of the traditional rural community: the Reformation, the national debt, tea drinking, decadent MPs sitting for rotten boroughs, the genteel fashion for mahogany furniture, sofas and picturesque views in which the countryside was dissociated from utility, the abolitionists (accused of being more ‘concerned’ about distant slaves than about native English labourers) and, as some of Cobbett’s admirers still struggle to accept, Jews. The list is long, varied and disconcerting, even after Cobbett has bundled up everything on it to produce the overwhelming biblical monster he named ‘the thing. 

Polarised allegories also feature strongly in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, who may well appeal to the Brexiteers not just as the author of ‘The Secret People,’ but as the man who turned being a ‘Little Englander’ into a positive virtue.

The presentation was made at a British Academy symposium and can be read with others on the British Academy website in the report European Union and Disunion – reflections on European Identity (2017) which I had downloaded some time ago without noticing the Wright contribution. But it encouraged me to activate google search and discover a Demos pamphlet from 1995 The Battle over Britain which clearly laid the basis for the subsequent Cool Britannia theme. A decade later, Gordon Brown tried in vain to get the notion of British identity taken seriously but was faced down by a wave of criticisms including the redoubtable Tom Nairn who called him The Bard of Britishness  

This is the latest of what has become quite a series of musings about what the 23 June 2016 Referendum might tell us about the sort of people the Brits are… When I then went on to ask whether novelists don’t perhaps have better insights than specialist academics, I had forgotten the debate of the mid 1990s and the later one sparked off by poor Gordon Brown. 
But it's ironic that what has tuned out so far to be the most insightful of the bunch, should have been penned by an academic - if of a rather unusual sort !

Resources for English identity

- England’s Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (2018) - explores the various strands which have created the english weave over the centuries - looks very strong on theory

- The Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony Barnett (2017) – probably the best analysis of the issue, written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages. . Each of its 34 chapters has an almost self-explanatory title. It is one of these rare books that you realise half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely and make notes about….I received the book only in September and will devote a special post to it in the autumn

- The party politics of Englishness 2014 – a typical exploration by a political science academic of the question

- The debate on Englishness can no longer be avoided; 2012 short article

- British identity and political discourse – analysis of New Labour’s search for identity; a useful little piece from an outsider from 2010

- Priestley’s England – JB Priestley and English culture (2007) a biography of the man which looks at the society in which he became such a famous name.

- BBC Postscripts; a lovely tribute to the 1941 radio talks Priestley did in which you can hear excerpts

- Priestley’s Finest Hour; Commentary from one of the librarians of the University collection of Priestley’s works

- English Journey; JB Priestley (1936) Gives a sense of the sort of people he met as he travelled around by bus

- The secret people; GK Chesterton. The poem which was apparently used by a lot of Brexiteers

- Rural Rides; William Cobbitt (1830) an early example of a political travelogue by a great radical

Send in the Clowns

The new deadline of 31 October fixed by the EU at Wednesday night's Summit proves that the UK has indeed “lost control”..... 
John Harris, out on his illuminating Brexit travels again, visited the Prime Minister’s constituency of Maidenhead - and is left almost literally tearing his hair at one Conservative activist's refusal to moderate his charge that the Prime Minister was a "traitor"......

Recent posts have explored whether novelists or social historians have the better skill-set to make sense of what is going on these days in England’s green and pleasant land.

I had clearly forgotten about comedians – with the Little Britain characters (of a decade ago) being obvious contenders for the award of those who best exemplify the country….Except there is stiff competition from the Frankie Boyle New World Order insights – let alone the classic Basil Fawlty (of 40 years ago).

Fawlty Towers was, above all, an ensemble piece about isolation. It was a portrait of rage and frustration, an exploration of the impotence that results when the world as we wish it to be is so agonisingly at odds with the world as it is.

It was the Brexit mindset incubating in the shabby surroundings of a down-at-heel hotel that had seen far better days.What is Basil Fawlty, beyond the proprietor of this macabre hotel? Well, he is a snob, for starters: in the first ever episode, "A Touch of Class", he abruptly reverses his customary hostility on learning that a prospective guest is a lord, clearly hoping that a visiting toff will magically improve the hotel’s social standing (one of his first conversational gambits is to rave to Lord Melbury about the properties of fields of wheat, which may perhaps have stuck somewhere in Theresa May’s psyche). 

A man of somewhat mysterious origins, Basil Fawlty is acutely class conscious, at once mistrustful of the working classes and a Labour party that he sees as encouraging their propensity for industrial action, and anxious about his own lack of social status. Professionals – experts, one might say – frighten him; rules and regulations intimidate him; the need to ingratiate himself to foreigners infuriates him. 

The put-upon Spanish waiter, Manuel, is, for Basil, there to receive a last kick – usually up the backside – from imperial Britain. He is another outsider to be pushed, prodded, poked and communicated with through a loudhailer. But the British empire to which Basil wants to return is already a thing of the past; the world more complicated than his blinkered mind can admit. Watch Fawlty’s visceral horror as young people flaunt their sexuality, as the common people dare to holiday in sedate Torquay, and – in a moment that causes Fawlty to literally jump in disbelief – the NHS is staffed by doctors who are black.

Basil’s most celebrated meltdown comes, of course, when he is confronted with a touring group of well-to-do, articulate, friendly Germans. His psyche splits: he knows he must be welcoming, but cannot find the mental space or language that allows him to forget the second world war…….
 If only we had picked up that Basil – far from being a glimpse into the past – was a snapshot of the future, we might have been able to do something about it.

For the more cerebral amongst us, however, there is another, equally hallowed and longer running, series which captured the belief system at the heart of this blessed land – Yes Minister – which graced our television screens for most of the 1980s. There indelibly is Perfidious Albion in drag – the foibles of the political class exposed for all to see

What we didn’t know at the time was that the brilliant creator of the series – Anthony Jay – had based his script on the theories of the “public choice” economists who promulgated the view that all “public servants” were serving….their own interests…..

In  other words, the series was laying the ground for the neoliberal doctrine which has led to such cynicism about politics….(the last link is to a powerful short article supporting this thesis)

Despite this, I am a great admirer of Anthony Jay’s work which encompassed some great non-fictions books. “Management and Machiavelli” (1969) enthused me no end (I was battling a traditional bureaucracy at the time) - and he “almost single-handedly resurrected the academic study of that 15^th century genius. And Jay followed it up with an equally brilliant book – “Corporation Man” – based on his observations of the BBC…… His talents even extended to tossing off elegant guides to running an effective meetings! Indeed some of my more regular readers will know that I have been known to use his “Democracy, Bernard, it must be stopped” when discussing the workings of the political class. For my money, the article can’t be bettered…

I once found an edited transcript to the entire Yes Minister series which I left behind in Sofia but was delighted to find the entire work here for my permanent perusal!

Update

The role of the comic or jester in politics seems to be in the air these days since there were a couple of learned discussions of the issue this month – on both sides of the Atlantic. First, the NYR Daily gave us this nice walk down Memory Lane - What Koestler knew about jokes

William Davis is a very serious policy wonk whose The Funny Side of Politics also came to my attention only after this post. It surprised me in making no reference to Arthur Koestler who famously explored the dynamics of the joke in 1949 in the first part of Insight and Outlook – an inquiry into the common foundations of science, art and social ethics and updated his thoughts in The Act of Creation, (1964) devoting 100 pages to an exposition on The Jester. It mist have been the second book that I read in the 1960s and remember being bowled over by it.

His approach continues to attract attention as can be seen in this nice comparison with Bergson a few years back and this rather more ponderous  25 page analysis of his theory from the 1980s  

And, while we’re on the subject of politics as entertainment, let’s not forget Neil Postman’s brilliant Amusing Ourselves to Death; (1985) and Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the elimination of television;  (1978).

LRB also gave us a few years ago this great overview of the English satiric tradition - Sinking into the Sea - which took as its cue a little book entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson" edited by Harry Mount

spring cleaning - with a difference

Spring cleaning is generally a chore but can, if serendipity is in the air, be a pleasure – particularly if the focus of removal is .......books. Space needs to be created in the cluttered shelves if new finds are to have a home…. 
Getting rid of books which had disappointed is the easy part – so no question about recent buys which had let me down – eg Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom; Euan Davies’ “Post-Truth”; and Craig Oliver’s “Unleashing Demons” although I should probably take another look at Slavoj Zizek’s “The Courage of Hopelessness”, much as his style annoys me. (the last link by the way is to a real skewer of a review by novelist Will Self) which helps direct the book into the reject category…

I also have quite a few titles from the Lonely Planet and Footprint series – particularly France, Italy and Turkey…..but also an enticing couple on India and Andalucia

I thought it would be a simple matter to evict the titles which had been lurking unopened for several years but She Who Must Be Obeyed likes her stock of books about the operation of the EU which go back almost 25 years and includes, for example, Keith Middlemas’ Orchestrating Europe (1995) So reprieve is graciously granted these….

Howard Zinn’s  “A People’s History of the United States” causes a minor twinge as it goes – it is such a good read….Laurence Cosse’s “A Novel Bookstore” and “Eva Luna” are both great novels but don’t fall into the category of books which should be reread    particularly when I still haven’t done justice to the likes of Dostoyevski, Conrad or gone back to reread Aldous Huxley and HG Wells (eg his "The New Machiavelli")

But before I release Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism or John Carey’s The Unexpected Professor – an Oxford Life in Books, I would like a last few minutes with them – providing, that is, they are destined for a good home!! 
A couple of self-help books also could do with a quick skim before they join the haul of a dozen or so books which I will now offer up to friends…

But, as I’ve been carrying out this exercise, I’ve been very aware of how many of the 400 books in my virtual library are also still not properly read – and, more to the point, offer much more powerful reads than most of the titles in bookshops these day…..
So there’s another project for me – it is a matter of a few hours to transfer the url to my blog (uploading any which are no longer available to my website).

The pity, however, is that the world doesn’t know what an amazing resource/library my blog and website is…..Time perhaps for some marketing??

Books which can be immediately downloaded in full – just click on the title (UPDATED)
New Entries

Political Order and Political Decay; Francis Fukuyama (2014). The second volume (which can be downloaded in full!!) of Fukuyama’s magnum opus. Its introduction summarises the first volume – and the opening chapters set out his framework showing the link between economic, social and political development and how ideas about legitimacy have shaped our understanding of the three basic building blocks of “modern” government – “the state”, “rule of law” and “democratic accountability” (see the figure at p43)

This first chapter spells out how very different social conditions and traditions in the various continents have affected the shape and integrity of government systems (The sequencing of bureaucracy and challenge to political power is of particular interest)

Politics and Governance in the UK; Michael Moran (2005) is actually a textbook – aimed at undergraduates - from one of the best UK political scientists whose focus was much wider than most such academics. Somehow such people are clearer writers than those with narrow specialisms. 
Given the breadth of his reading and the originality of his thought, it's ideal reading (even at 500 pages) for a foreign audience 

Original Titles

Against Power Inequalities – reflections on the struggle for inclusive communities; Henry Tam (2010) One of these rare book aimed at activists but written by an academic… Positively inspiring

Capitalism and its Economics – a critical history; Douglas Dowd (2000). The Pluto Press is a rare British leftist publisher which ensures that its titles are clearly written – since it is aiming not at academics but the committed citizen.

The Economics of the 1% - how mainstream economics serves the rich, obscures reality and distorts policy, John Weeks (2014) One of the small bunch of economics titles I strongly recommend

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; Stephen Covey (1989) I have been recommending this book to change-agents since its publication (and often giving a version translated into a foreign language). It is, of course, the sort of self-help book despised by bien-pensants – but, as I say, it’s well worth study….

The Primacy of Politics – social democracy and the making of the 20^th Century;  Sheri Berman (2006)

I’m a despairing social democrat and find it ironic that one of the best treatments of the subject is by an American academic

A Brief History of NeoLiberalism; David Harvey (2005) One of these essential books….a good review is here http://rebels-library.org/files/d3Thompson-1.pdf

The Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists; ed P Arestis (1992) Don’t be deceived by the humble title – this is fascinating stuff…History is, as someone once said, written by the victors. I had heard of few of the almost 100 individuals in this book (although I was taught by 2 – Meek and Nove) but it tells the story of those whose courage deserves to be remembered

How to change the World  - reflections on Marx and Marxism; Eric Hobsbawm (2011) Like most people, I tend to be put off by those who talk about Marx. This is my loss, I readily agree…and Hobsbawm is one of the few people who could persuade me to lift my self-imposed cynicism on the subject….

The Fifth Discipline- the art and practice of the learning organisation; Peter Senge (1990) A seminal book which started a long-lasting fascination with “organizational learning” (personal note - in the 80s I even wrote a master’s thesis on the subject!)
Building the Bridge as you walk on it – a guide for leading change; Robert Quinn (2004) With “Change the World”, one of my all-time favourites. Before attempting the entire book, you might find this summary useful; as well as this excerpt from the first chapter.

Decisions. Decisions…….

A daughter’s career dilemma raises the question of how well served we are by the literature on decision-making. With the usual serendipity, I had just bought from the second-hand English bookshop here "Decisive – how to make better decisions in Life and Work" (2013) whose focus is actually a bit more on the commercial world – although it does give examples of more solitary decision-making. It is actually one of no less than 89 books which one site offers on decision-making

And I had already noticed that the bookshelves are being increasingly swamped by books by psychologists divulging in numbing detail their various experiments and how they might help us improve our personal decision-making.

I blame populiser Malcolm Gladwell - for the success of his 2005 "Blink – the power of thinking without thinking" about which a contemporary reviewer wrote -

Malcolm Gladwell’s fevered new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is evangelical in a got-religion kind of way, with Gladwell praising a stratagem he calls “thin-slicing” — using the smallest amount of information possible to make decisions. In fact he’s wandering through territory staked out by Herbert Simon fifty years ago when he wrote about “bounded rationality,” as well as by practitioners of a branch of psychology called “heuristics and biases,” and by evolutionary biologists and economists and neuroscientists and philosophers and those ancient taxonomists who classified cognition as either intuition or reason. It’s a long literature, and hey! who has time for it?

The result, ironically, of this embarrassment of riches is to make it increasingly difficult to find the book on the subject which might best fit a particular person at a particular point. Of course, you can find lots of reviews of such books – but they are of a single book and give no overall assessment of the field..  And those most capable of doing such comparative assessments would never attempt it...for fear of the damage it would do their professional or academic reputations….”did you hear that old so and so actually reviewed a clutch of self-help books??? What is the world coming to…??”

I can’t say I am all that decisive myself – things panned out well for me...so I tend to a more fatalistic philosophy….Que sera sera. But the reference to Herbert Simon in the review above reminds me that I do have form in this field of decision-making…..Back in the 1980s I took a part-time MSc in the country’s first degree course in Policy Analysis in which Simon and others such as Etzioni loomed large….I even, in 2002, wrote a Manual on the subject – for Slovak senior civil servants!

The New Labour government of 1997 made the subject a sexy one – although the manuals its policy unit spawned were still rationalistic…..it was not until the mid 2000s that I got a copy of what remains for me far and away the most satisfactory (less rationalistic) treatment - Policy Paradox -the art of political decision-making by Deborah Stone

A post last autumn noted the explosion of interest the last decade has seen in efforts to change people’s behavior – initially it seemed by governments although subsequent revelations demonstrated the extent to which big business had been successfully using algorithms to influence our social behavior…

My plea

So my plea to editors of book sections and of Literary journals is – please don’t look down on these popular books on decision-making….there are a lot of readers out there who would value some guidance to the literature!

Background Reading

Decisive - how to make better decisions in life and Work; C and D Heath (2013) 

https://fs.blog/2015/06/books-on-decision-making/

https://epdf.tips/queue/handbook-of-decision-making.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/21/the-art-of-decision-making

Blink – the power of thinking without thinking  - the full read

The Art of Decision Making; Helen Drummond (2001)

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/10/19/cooling-it/

https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-decisive/

The sculptures which heads the post were found in Cernavoda on the border between Romania and Bulgaria and date from 6,000 BC ie the oldest of their sort.... 

Memorable Texts

Rereading a book after a gap of 50 years can be a grave disappointment – that was certainly the case for me recently when I was able to download Stan Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery which I had read in the 1970s. What I had remembered as a series of caustic witticisms turned out to be rather belaboured and cheap digs..  

Thanks to researchgate, I am currently rereading with a great deal of pleasure a book which made a huge impact on me in the early 60s - during my Politics and Economics course at the University of Glasgow. The Twenty Years’ Crisis is the first classic of what was to become the prestigious discipline of International Relations. 

It opens with the fascinating story of how any field of study generally starts with a utopian stage - which focuses on the ideal or how things should be, eg the study of gold for example started with alchemy. Only after major disappointments and no little strife do people move on to adopt a more scientific approach. Thus the high hopes with which the 20^th Century started were dashed by the horror of the First World War – paving the way for the efforts in the 20s and 30s to “end all war”. “The Twenty Years’ Crisis” was written not just to challenge such naivety – but to explain it. It was at the printers on the very day in 1939 that the Second World War was declared…

What was it about Carr’s writing – almost 60 years ago – that gave his words such impact then and now? At the time I know I was also reading Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) which also left a lasting impact. It must have been the bluntness with which the doctrine of Realism was spelled out in the two books – against the chimera of utopianism which had been so well taken apart by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1944) 

Another important – if less memorable - book in the course was “Ideology and Utopia” (1954) by Karl Mannheim, an early text on the sociology of knowledge…. 

The texts in the Economics part of the programme offered no such exciting reading - with one noticeable exception – Schumpeter’s powerful Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

All in all, it’s perhaps not surprising that I emerged from my studies as a reformist convinced of the benefits of Fabianism….Ironic that my LSE tutor on the political sociology MSc programme I briefly enrolled in should turn out to be Ralph Miliband of Parliamentary Socialism fame (1961) - but even more ironic that his two sons should in the 2000s rise to such heights in the party he despised.

And if you think these titles were dated even for the 1960s, that was all that universities could offer in those days – even if JK Galbraith used the term “The Affluent Society” for his famous 1958 book. SM Wolin’s Politics and Vision – continuity and innovation in western political thought was quite exceptional as a 1960 textbook which was given pride of place in our reading list…

What is History? is based on lectures Carr gave in 1960 and contains a sentence which has stayed with me for half a century….   

facts are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what we catch will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean we choose to fish in and what tackle we chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish we want to catch. By and large, we will get the kind of facts we want

I mused recently about what it was that accounted for the originality of good writing – suggesting that straddling of boundaries (whether national or intellectual) does help give an extra dimension to one’s understanding. Carr was a Brit through and through but straddled the worlds of the civil service (Foreign Office); journalism (Deputy Editor of The Times no less) and academia. It’s increasingly rare to find such career combinations these days – which is very much our loss!!

update; https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/eh-carr-what-is-history-truth-subjectivity-facts

The crayon drawing which adorns this text is by Grigor Naidenov - one of my favourite Bulgarian artists of the first half of the 20th century, well known for his aquarelle cafe scenes...